"You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on."
-Dean Martin

The morning after my first absinthe 'experience,' I woke from the strangest dream. Half-dressed hare krishnas painted entirely smurf-blue (in honor of Lord Krishna, I suppose) were pelting me with strawberries and shouting 'Uhura ahkbar!' But even though they were only using the berries to throw at me, when I bent to pick one up and pop it into my mouth, they slapped it out of my hand and started kicking me, screaming, 'You can't eat those! Those are the Lord's berries!'

I finally woke just as one of the hare krishnas was ripping out a giant marble water fountain (never watch One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest while under the influence) and was preparing to drop it on top of my head.

When I came to, I was confused and in pain. At first, I thought my dream was real--that I'd just had a marble water fountain dropped on my head, and of course I had a bit of a headache. But of course that was absurd. But the only other explanation I could come up with is that, at some point in the previous evening, I became a vampire with aa serious concussion. I prayed for the swift end awaiting me as the room filled with light from a sun that seemed to be right outside my window.

Scotland is generally a country ideally suited for hangovers. Vomiting in the streets is considered merely a minor faux pas and a part of a normal evening, rather than the arrestable offense it is in the States. Moreover, there is almost constant cloud cover and drizzle; not only does this block that yellow bitch in the sky, but it also adequately reflects my normal morning-after mood (i.e. I-feel-miserable-so-everyone-else-fucking-should-as-well).

But this morning (afternoon?) was accursedly clear. And although I felt a vampiric sensitivity to sunlight, and the white light filling the room felt like two hypodermics of molten lead being injected directly into my eye sockets, the light steadfastly refused to incinerate me like a Buddhist monk. On top of that, my tongue itched. I wasn't even aware that was possible!

I pulled the covers over my head, and, oddly enough, began to think about the goddess Athena. You see, one day the king of the Greek gods, Zeus, had a particularly difficult headache, and instead of taking an aspirin or a drink of the hair of the minotaur that bit him, he gets one of his fellow gods to bash him on the head with a hammer (the Greeks had such interesting solutions to common problems). Understandably, his skull splits open, and out springs a full-grown beautiful naked woman, none the worse for being stuck between Zeus' frontal lobe and pineal gland (though, if this and other stories about Zeus are any indication, there was probably plenty of breathing room in the frontal lobe area). This woman is Athena, the goddess of justice and law.

For a brief, semi-coherent moment, I hoped that this was my problem. But I quickly realized that, even if I were a greek god, rather than a Scotch-Norwegian mutt with a pray-for-death hangover, I didn't particularly want my brain creased by a literal hammer on top of the figurative ones. And I wasn't really in the mood to deal with a nude authoritarian woman, beautiful or otherwise (unless by 'deal with' you mean 'quite possibly vomit all over'--a particularly bad way of dealing with women, even the mythological ones).

I spent the rest of the day in bed, drinking liters of water and hissing at everyone who tried to turn the light on or open the curtains I had bravely ventured out to close. And as the day wore on, a swift blow to the head resulting in unconsciousness or paralysis seemed more and more appealing.